Is this related to the current controversy around Ivermectin as a treatment for COVID19? If so, what new information can this 2017 article provide around this controversy?
pro-tip: When naturalnews.com veraciously agrees with something, there's a good chance that "something" is completely made up.
The Ivermectin signal has been around since 07/2020. It's a shame it took more than a year for reputable institutions to even consider touching the subject. https://c19ivermectin.com. I thought we are in a world-wide emergency crisis, where we are tapping all available resources as soon as humanly possible.
There is some hope for reputable answers from https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2021-06-23-ivermectin-be-investiga..., yet to be completed.
> https://hcqmeta.com/#fcite_rct (Figure 7, scroll down)
> https://ivmmeta.com/#fig_fpr
Hydroxychloroquine: My personal opinion is that it's just report and publication bias.
Ivermectin: My personal opinion is that it looks more interesting, but after taking a deeper look, it's full of small studies that are not pre-registered where a fluke created an optimistic result that is not statistically significant. (I'd just drop most/all of them.)
The main difference is that Hydroxychloroquine has a few big studies with a few thousand of patients, but with Ivermectin all the RCT studies have at most a few hundred patients.
Complete thread with the original links and more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27691080
It's also interesting that I pick the first RCT in the site about Ivermectin https://c19ivermectin.com/chowdhury.html , and it actually compares Ivermectin and Hydroxychloroquine. It is listed as a success in the Ivermectin site but it's not listed a failure in the Hydroxychloroquine site. Anyway, it's small and not statistically significant, so I'd not read too many conclusions from it.
I don't think any of those are good places to get a sense of the current scientific literature.
The lack of large completed trials for an off patent medicine should be a black eye for the NIH.
Ivermectin is an anti-parasite drug. It is not an anti-viral. There is no theory for a mechanism of action for why it would be effective against COVID. There is some laboratory evidence that Ivermectin at very high concentrations can inhibit replication of COVID-19 and other viruses. The problem with this is that extrapolating from those concentrations to a dosing regimen means a dose of Ivermectin far, far higher than the dosage of Ivermectin given in humans.
So, without sufficient evidence, there's no compelling reason to do a large trial of Ivermectin.
They note that there is a large amount of misinformation circulating, that it is harmful at high doses, and that it not an anti-viral.
Is the study mentioned on https://www.medpagetoday.com/special-reports/exclusives/9348... the source of this? It seems to be a small sample size with ambiguous results at best (decreased mortality but unchanged hospitalization rate).
"Today, ivermectin is continuing to surprise and excite scientists, offering more and more promise to help improve global public health by treating a diverse range of diseases, with its unexpected potential as an antibacterial, antiviral and anti-cancer agent being particularly extraordinary."
Each year, Dihydrogen Monoxide is a known causative component in many thousands of deaths and is a major contributor to millions upon millions of dollars in damage to property and the environment. Some of the known perils of Dihydrogen Monoxide are:
* Death due to accidental inhalation of DHMO, even in small quantities.
* Prolonged exposure to solid DHMO causes severe tissue damage.
* Excessive ingestion produces a number of unpleasant though not typically life-threatening side-effects.
* DHMO is a major component of acid rain.
* Gaseous DHMO can cause severe burns.
* Contributes to soil erosion.
* Leads to corrosion and oxidation of many metals.
* Contamination of electrical systems often causes short-circuits.
* Exposure decreases effectiveness of automobile brakes.
* Found in biopsies of pre-cancerous tumors and lesions.
* Given to vicious dogs involved in recent deadly attacks.
* Often associated with killer cyclones in the U.S. Midwest and elsewhere, and in hurricanes including deadly storms in Florida, New Orleans and other areas of the southeastern U.S.
* Thermal variations in DHMO are a suspected contributor to the El Nino weather effect.
This is missleading and is a straight up unnecessary disparagement of DHMO. Pure DHMO is perfectly safe to use around electricity. People have even built computers in an atmosphere of pure DHMO. Problems only arise if the DHMO is itself contaminated with something.
We should be placing the blame on the unseen actors and not the highly visible accessory.
Shouldn't that be "hydrosphere"? Though Babbage's steam powered Difference Engine might count as making use of a "water atmosphere."
And just for giggles, have a steam powered robot:
Sorry, maybe tragic is a better word. Look at Latin American and ivermectin usage. This is yet another non-treatment that is being used to scam the vulnerable and ignorant. It has been a depressing 20 minutes catching up on ivermectin + covid news. Barely effective at best, yet there's a black market of animal-grade medicine now in some countries.
The virus is mutating. "the (Israeli) government said that as of June 6, the (Pfizer) vaccine provided 64% protection against infection".
The vaccines are narrow in scope, making mutations likely to evade vaccine protection.
The world population is large. Most people live outside developed countries, and don't have easy access to -15C storage equipment.
One problem I have with this is that Ivermectin is proposed by real doctors who treat patients on ground zero. As far as one can see, there is zero incentives for them to promote a treatment that does not work.
But on the other hand, there are huge incentives to censor the efficacy of Ivermectin and other treatments.
In a perfect world where research and reporting is done with out bias and financial incentives, you would be right. But sadly we don't live in that perfect world.
To treat Covid, or to treat fungal infections that happen as a result of Covid messing with patients' immune systems?
At the level needed to show an antiviral effect, or the levels in some medication people are randomly misusing, I'm reading it is very toxic.
The dose makes the poison. The typical dose of Ivermectin for treating parasites (and Covid19) is 0.2mg/Kg. The LD50 is around >15mg/Kg in humans. Around the world it is one of the most administered medicines. AFAIK, not a single death has been attributed to it. Extremely safe.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
I could easily be confused, since I've never taken a biology course after high school. However, here is what I get from your link.
It mentions "addition of 5 μM ivermectin".
I believe "5 μM" is a ratio, meaning 5 μmol per liter. Ivermectin is C48H74O14 so the weight of a mole is about 875g. By my arithmetic that comes out to about 4.4 mg per liter.
So, if that can be loosely equated with the dosage "in vivo", assuming a liter is about a kg because everything is mostly water, it's more than 20 times the normal ratio, and nearly 1/3 of the LD50.
I notice this comment:
"no toxicity was observed with ivermectin at any of the concentrations tested"
I may be missing something, but this seems like the comments about proving safety could be misleading or even disingenuous, if ivermectin's toxicity first or mainly applies to the nervous system and not the kind of cells they were experimenting with.
What kind of cells were they using? It says "Vero/hSLAM". Vero = "kidney epithelial cells extracted from an African green monkey" and hSLAM means Vero cells "that have been stably transfected with a plasmid encoding the gene for the human [signaling lymphocytic activation molecule]"
It's quite possible there's something very basic I don't understand, but after doing my best to interpret it, I would personally tend to qualify the results as "antiviral in dosages that are probably nontoxic to some parts of the kidneys of green monkeys".
If was put on the spot, given such a dose for covid-19 purposes, I would not be very confident that it wouldn't be neurotoxic, even if I also believed it was less than the LD50.
However, this all hinges on me understanding the dosage/ratio, and I may have screwed that up.